(no subject)

My body has erupted in pain.

First I couldn't play the piano - I was playing with too much tension, but I'm built from trauma, I do *everything* with too much tension. Then my chest went. And my shoulders, my back, my arms. Now I can't lift things; can barely type.

I'm trying to recover and rest, but how? I need to stop weightlifting and binding; stop doing things with my hands; stop working, writing, playing music, picking anything up; and most importantly, to relax.

I'm trying to pay close attention to my body and its signals, and be present in it - never mind that this itself is a source of tension; and I'm trying to manage this experience without the outlet of making things or writing or doing anything at all. And this coming on the heels of a decade of mental health, as if I made a bad deal with a fairy, who has granted me back my mind at long last - only to take away my physical health in return. It's cruel, and what reserves of acceptance I had are so drained from years of coming to terms with my mental ills there's little left for this.

(no subject)

I'm working on a "holy book" for my magical tradition, which is really more like a reading list of stuff I like. I've always felt the absence of a holy book in my Paganism in the past. It's nice to build around a Bible - you can read from it, you can write sermons around it, you can carry it with you, you have a liturgy and 2000 years of the very best artists in Western civilisation making you art and poems and songs.

So the goal is to create something similar for myself, a reading list so at the end of the day I can sit down with my "Bible" and read a few reflective paragraphs to send me on my way to sleep. Or which I can rummage through for poems and quotes and images to build ritual around.

My tradition has a connection to Folk Horror as an inspiration, so I'm delighted to find this really good collection of essays on the greats from the genre - and I'm basically working my way down the list while sitting on the sofa, desperately wishing I could knit or paint or write or do anything but sit bloody still and be present in my body and touch nothing. But even a week's movie marathon is less fun than it would be if I could write about what I was watching at the same time :/